A short delay. But don’t delay
In a speech on Tuesday at the EFRAG conference, European Commissioner Mairead McGuinness provided a public indication of something that we have been expecting for some time. As things stand, the steps required to formalise the EFRAG sustainability reporting (ESRS) taxonomy as official EU regulations will be delayed. In other words, the digital mandate for Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD) reporting is very unlikely to go live until 2025, twelve months later than the rest of the CSRD requirements for large reporting entities.
In our view, companies should nevertheless be thinking digital from the outset, and not waste time creating manual processes, policies, procedures and controls that will need to be altered one year later.
Thinking digital around climate and sustainability disclosures will ensure the relevance and visibility of these disclosures. There will be nothing stopping corporates from preparing either private test or public voluntary digital disclosures in Inline XBRL – something we would encourage companies to do in order to ensure internal processes are digitally ready from the get go. EFRAG confirmed that the ESRS taxonomy will be published for consultation in January.
The speech will soon be available here.
